Monday, May 23, 2011

Joplin Tornado. Any gay people targetted?

Religious looneys, from Harold Camping to Pat Robertson, and Bradlee Dean, the homophobic preacher in Minnesota who attacked President Obama's faith today, all love to blame gays for all kinds of dark and sinister things. Camping said that his apparently falsely predicted apocalypse this weekend was partly due to the fact that our society tolerated gay people. Others like Robertson and the late Falwell tried to blame 911 on gay people and later claimed that hurricanes or the devastation in New Orleans was also due to, you guessed it, gay people.

The interesting thing is that, if God hates gay people so much, and sends these natural disasters to try to kill them, he sure does seem to have bad aim. He usually ends up killing all kinds of people who aren't gay at all. Recent strings of tornados across the Southern US and flooding along the Mississippi seem to have inordinately targeted the Bible Belt and people who tend to be fanatic christians. If God really wanted to get gay people, it would seem that he could target the gay pride parade with lightning bolts and tornados and spare the rest of us. I know that the ancient Hebrews had a philosophy that God would punish the innocent for the sins of the guilty, perhaps to make the innocent survivors angry and willing to lynch the evil doers. However, this seems both inefficient and morally unjustifiable. In any event, I suspect that Joplin was far from a hot-bed of Sodom and Gomorrah activity.